Sketchbook wallpapers - making of

In this simple tutorial, I will write how I made Sketchbook series of wallpapers. I wanted to draw small sheet of notebook paper on wooden table. To start, I found an appropriate stock image of wood texture from www.sxc.hu.

To make background more interesting, open Effects menu - Distort - Lens correction, and set Vignette amount to about -30..35.

I could draw sheet of notebook paper using vector tools, but I decided to take actual sheet and scan it. Because paper is white, I put it under black book and scanned this way.

Open scanned image in Photoshop, open Levels (Ctrl-L), move black triangle to the right as shown here, and white rectangle to the left. Paper should become completely white (no light grey) and background completely black.

Invert image (Ctrl-I). Then, if your image is flattened" (there is only one layer called Background) you should "un-flatten" it. To do it